Exploring the Quark-Gluon Plasma with ALICE at the LHC, Dr. Yvonne Pachmayer (Heidelberg)

A Large Ion Collider Experiment (ALICE) is the dedicated detector setup to study all aspects of heavy ion collisions at the LHC at CERN. It is assumed that in nucleus-nucleus collisions at high energies a high density de-confined state of strongly interacting matter, known as Quark-Gluon-Plasma (QGP), is created. ALICE is designed to measure a large set of observables in order to study the properties of this QGP, the form of matter believed to have existed in our Universe during the first microsecond after the Big Bang. The QGP is predicted by the fundamental theory of strong interactions (Quantum-Chromodynamics, QCD) and is characterized by an equilibrated system of liberated quarks and gluons that are the constituents of atomic nuclei. This talk will focus on a few selected results obtained with the ALICE experiment during the two long heavy ion runs at sqrt(s_NN) = 2.76 TeV, which took place at the end of 2010 and 2011.